So you want an SOA? Edge East preso

Yesterday I presented at Web Services Edge East on the topic of getting started with service orientation and an SOA.
It was standing room only, which says as much about the size of the room as the popularity of the topic 😉 But nonetheless it seemed like a good turnout, and I got a lot of questions and request afterward for a copy of the presentation. (Please send me an email if you’d like a copy, too.)
You can also find a link to the article I wrote for Web Logic Developer’s Journal on my Sys-Con author’s page. The presentation is pretty much based on the article.
And the material in both the article and the presentation was based on early drafts of the book I wrote with Greg Lomow, which my editor tells me is doing pretty well so far.
A lot of questions came up about how to get started designing services, about the capabilities of an ESB with respect to SOA infrastructure, and the relationship of business process management to services.
It really seems like there are a lot of definitions of SOA and ESB out there in the marketplace right now. But as I pointed out in the presentation, I think that the definitions will eventually have to settle down onto what’s established in the marketplace.
For example, Credit Suisse has an SOA in production with more than 700 services, processing about a billion transactions a year. Here’s David Chappell’s presentation on SOA that references Credit Suisse and a reference to the often cited Gartner study on the Credit Suisse SOA (sorry but unless you pay you only get the first paragraph).
Deutsche Post is another company building a large scale SOA. Their success to date is being watched carefully throughout the industry, and they are members (along with IONA and several others) of JSR 208, the Java Business Integration specification effort.
These real projects, meeting real business requirements every day, are the kinds of things that will make SOAs and ESBs real, and provide the foundations for the real definitions once the hype settles down.